PRESS RELEASE: More Cloak, Less Dagger

LOA PRESS RELEASE, June 2010

MORE CLOAK & LESS DAGGER

CIA Veteran Leutrell Osborne says Covert Action is Obsolete

Can We Maintain Security with a Kinder, Gentler Intelligence Community?

by Iona Miller, June, 2010

"When did the DNI's new leadership start determining that we had to give up rights so we can protect a vulnerability in our nation-state's security? What is the real DNI agenda? When will the HUMINT capabilities be improved and increased? When will the funds be pulled from Covert Action intelligence operations so the funds can be used for greater results? Tell me when you news people will really get the more important stories going? " --Leutrell Osborne, Sr.

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”  --Rilke

Leutrell Osborne, Sr. bids for Director of National Intelligence

Annapolis, Md., June 5, 2010. President Obama forced out his Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in late May of 2010 and began reevaluating the post, which is probably best led by a civilian, according to top lawmakers. "The president needs to decide what he wants the DNI to be," Feinstein said, "and then work with the intelligence committees to see that the necessary authority is, in fact, in law." It needs to be someone who can work with Directors of CIA, NSA and FBI, as well as the support agencies.

But, as of this writing, the President supports tough-sell candidate James Clapper, with his military background. Since retiring as a US Air Force general, he’s headed the Pentagon’s intelligence operations, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But, he may lack Congressional support and credibility. Further the function of DNI, who doesn't actually direct anything, needs to be clarified by Congress. Legislation is required to increase the power of the position. 

Clapper is a personal favorite of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who selected Clapper as undersecretary of Defense for intelligence in January 2007. When he stayed on in 2009, he became one of the few holdovers from the Bush administration in a top policy position.

Two former intelligence officials said the nomination of Clapper would send a signal that, by design or default, the administration was accepting a more limited mandate for the DNI than advocates for the position had in mind when Congress created the job in 2004 to address intelligence failures prior to the 9/11 attacks.

While Obama said Clapper would be his principal intelligence adviser, former officials said that task was increasingly in the hands of John Brennan, the White House’s Deputy National Security Adviser for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security.

It is sad that the Military Covert Actions intelligence umbrella now covers the NIC. It may be worse than what went on in the Soviet Union when the KGB and GRU did Covert Action intelligence operations.  Given the oil chaos the US Govt has to regroup on all major fronts and that means even NIC CA. 

Osborne wonders how things will get done especially knowing that the govt has two major internal weaknesses: each agency and department refuses to adequately collaborate with each other nor is there any tech system that works between the entities in the NIC.  Today only big dog companies are being hired by the NIC agencies and departments without hope of solving the inability of the agencies and departments to communicate to one another with harmony.

Top Spook

The DNI needs to wear many hats to coordinate and deploy the 16 intelligence agencies and report those filtered results directly to the President. First and foremost he needs visionary insight to navigate through the turbulent waters of international sociopolical complications, as well as the diplomatic power to mesh all the powerful players involved in the National Intelligence Community (NIC).

An effective DNI needs credibility to get the job done and the clout to determine and execute direction. He needs the capacity to mobilize and transform the Draconian bureaucracy. He even needs to be able to stand up to the President, helping him navigate and course correct the ship of State. Ultimately, issues with the DNI reflect on foreign affairs policy. Even if the NIC scales back Covert Action, there is still plenty conducted by DoD with military intelligence.

THE PROBLEM

WAR, ETHICS & TERROR

Issue No. 1

US intelligence needs to be reinvented and transformed, especially Covert Action intelligence operations in all of the various aspects called "dirty tricks." Tighter oversight and accountability with improved end results are required. Accountability boards are not enough. One still has to measure the failed Covert Action intelligence for “blowback.”

Issue No. 2

No nation-state currently polices transnational crime, which is a growing threat. Failure to provide adequate Human Intelligence (HUMINT) is a true weakness in the USA system. Most policy decisions are not based on hard HUMINT sourced information but other so-called facts and truths open to spin and interpretation. Senator Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of Select Committee on Intelligence claimed congressional oversight has increased about 100% since 9/11, but that program is now strangled.

Issue No. 3

The shadow of the Shadow Government, including domestic spying and assassinations, needs to be revealed to the American people and the world so we can finally heal. We must take responsibility for that shadow..

Issue No. 4

Our Constitutional rights are under attack, including the First Amendment. Free speech, the right to assembly, and freedom of the press are in jeopardy. It will be illegal to disagree with government policy, even with patriotic dissent. We've traded our democracy for corporate feudalism.

Issue No. 5

A serious consequence, the breakdown in credibility between the U.S. government and its citizenry, needs to be addressed, as well as increasing militarization of police and unwarranted surveillance of US citizens. The breakdown of domestic relations is a serious issue, perhaps concealing further manipulations. Those hunting the truth continue to press for disclosure from all knowledgeable sources.

ROLE OF THE UNITED STATES

CIA summarizes the situation in their 2015 report. Diplomacy is increasingly more complicated. In a diminishing US role, Washington will have greater difficulty harnessing its power to achieve specific foreign policy goals. The US Government will exercise a smaller and less powerful part of the overall economic and cultural influence of the United States abroad.
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In the absence of a clear and overriding national security threat, the United States will have difficulty drawing on its economic prowess to advance its foreign policy agenda. The top priority of the American private sector, which will be central to maintaining the US economic and technological lead, will be financial profitability, not foreign policy objectives.  The United States also will have greater difficulty building coalitions to support its policy goals, although the international community will often turn to Washington, even if reluctantly, to lead multilateral efforts in real and potential conflicts. 
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There will be increasing numbers of important actors on the world stage to challenge and check—as well as to reinforce—US leadership: countries such as China, Russia, India, Mexico, and Brazil; regional organizations such as the European Union; and a vast array of increasingly powerful multinational corporations and nonprofit organizations with their own interests to defend in the world.

But the problem of managing global affairs is made much more difficult by the diminishing power of the state. The Cold War, artificially, managed to organize almost every regional conflict in the world into a global system of conflict, which was managed at the top by two states that had an overarching interest in avoiding instability that could drag them into a very dangerous confrontation.

After it ended, many of the states of the old Soviet empire began to collapse, accelerating crime, lawlessness, tribal violence and terrorism. And the problem acknowledged in "Global Trends 2015" is that governments don't have very sophisticated mechanisms for dealing with "non-state actors."

REVISIONING THE SOLUTION

"When did the DNI's new leadership start determining that we had to give up rights so we can protect a vulnerability in our nation-state's security? How about suggesting that the DNI send a message out to the agencies and departments to do a better and stronger job at conducting Human Intelligence collection operations? We just might find out who and what the adversaries are doing. Thus, we don't have to give up our rights." Osborne has developed a Freedom Program to "counter those activities reducing freedoms, including dirty tricks such as Cointel Pro." --Leutrell Osborne, Sr.

CHANGING FACE OF INTELLIGENCE

CIA 2015 is a three-pillar blueprint for the agency's next five years. The goal of the plan is to ensure that the agency remains in step with current national security challenges, such as cyber threats and so-called "dangerous technology," according to a press statement. 

The other two pillars of CIA 2015 call for the agency to invest in a more highly trained, multilingual staff at home and abroad and to achieve business agility to better maintain a global presence and be better prepared for emergencies. The latter will include a transformation of global support platforms and a consolidation of some business activities.

A serious investment by the CIA needs to be made in training our cyber warriors to allow them to better recognize and mitigate intrusions. Training is best served by simulation exercises in a real time environment.

THE IC GOES CORPORATE

CIA has focused on corporate criteria, ignoring the time-honored metrics by which it has historically been held to account. Today, the agency's chief operating officer comes by way of investment banking. Business is booming, and to some that seems to be just about all that matters. The CIA now touts the fact that recruitment is way up—2,600 résumés pour in weekly. In one survey, MBAs rank the CIA as the premier government employer and ahead of such private-sector notables as Apple, Intel, and Pepsi.It is a source of great pride to the agency that customer demand for product— intelligence and analysis—has nearly outstripped capacity.

Agency insiders also celebrate the deregulation of their industry. "Agency Scrub," which once required overseas operatives to get approval from Langley before teaming up with particularly unsavory characters, has been set aside. Midnight abductions, lethal strikes from Predator drones, and interrogations conducted with "Torture Light" all signal a new and more business-friendly environment.  The CIA is not just another business. Its only true asset is credibility, its only success enhanced national security. Outcome is the only important vector. Effects are more important than intentions.

OUTSOURCING

Private CIA

CIA officials won't say how much of the agency’s work is done by private companies, but admit that outsourcing has increased substantially since 2001. Of the estimated $40 billion the United States is expected to spend on intelligence this year, experts say at least 50 percent will go to private contractors. An even bigger piece of the pie now goes to domestic security companies serving Fusion Centers.

Intelligence and law enforcement have merged and work together at home and abroad. Police departments across the country have created networks of databases called "fusion centers" in an effort to detect and prevent acts of terrorism. The ultimate objective is to create a nationwide reporting system of suspicious behaviors so that the authorities can "connect the dots" before an attack can occur.

Civil liberties groups claim these fusion centers are beset with legal and practical problems. One legal problem is that the police should not be opening files on people because they exercised their right to free speech, such as demonstrating against the foreign policies of the United States. One practical problem is that the police are gathering so much mundane information that practically anyone could end up on a list of "suspicious" persons because some official arbitrarily decided to fill out a tip sheet. Join us for a discussion of the pros and cons of this newly proposed system of policing.

Teams of military and law enforcement veterans and other motivated, capable Americans protect diplomats, provide training, and offer logistic services. They do those things in support of friendly nation peace operations around the world, including support of some of our Muslim allies.

Spy In the Box

Today's spies for hire can be found online. Independent contractors are the 'fast food' of Intelligence. Clients can order from their service menus. Traditionally, spies have always been outsourced, rather than official employees of intelligence agencies, such as Case Officers or "spy masters."

There are 16 official members of the Intelligence Community, an assemblage of separate agency intelligence organizations which gather, evaluate, and distribute information, most of which is secret. Made up of 16 organizations, its activities are controlled and coordinated by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who reports to the President.

The DNI is charged primarily with developing the overall intelligence budget, designing procedures to govern large intelligence acquisitions, setting priorities and coordinating policies/activities for the 16 intelligence agencies, monitoring covert operations, setting policy for working with foreign intelligence services. DNI has authority to request information from nonintelligence agencies, and perform joint planning for counterterrorism operations for all 16 intelligence agencies. Also reporting to DNI are the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is staffed by terrorism experts from the CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon; the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board; and the National Counter Proliferation Center.

Only a small percentage of the CIA's employees (perhaps less than 10 percent of the agency's estimated 10,000 to 20,000 workers) are clandestine officers involved in operations—the traditional spy stuff that includes recruiting sources, executing covert missions, and gathering intelligence. The remaining 90 percent are analysts, managers, scientists, and support staff. Because of their various roles, CIA employees require different levels of protective cover:

No cover. Upper management, college recruiters, congressional liaisons, Director George Tenet: These men and women are publicly acknowledged CIA employees.

Light cover. Many of the CIA's analysts and scientists fall under this category. Their families and friends might know who they really work for, but publicly, they claim to be employed by some other innocuous government agency or group. One former intelligence officer described this as "the cover you use if your airplane gets hijacked": It's safe enough to use on a quick visit overseas, say to meet with intelligence counterparts in a friendly country, but insufficient cover for spies stationed abroad.

Official cover. Most CIA employees engaged in operations overseas are given official cover: a sham job in the U.S. embassy (or working for another government agency) that affords them diplomatic immunity. These spies work under varying degrees of secrecy—the CIA station chief in a major ally nation may be well-known on the diplomatic cocktail circuit, but his subordinates, who actually recruit new informants, may not be. Such spies probably confide in their immediate families, but otherwise are unlikely to reveal their true occupation. (Although some operatives working in allied nations are "declared" officers, which means the CIA informs the host government that they are spies.) The advantage of official cover is that if officers are caught, they enjoy the benefits of diplomatic protection; at worst, they'd be publicly outed and sent home in disgrace.

Nonofficial cover. NOCs (the word rhymes with "rocks") are the most covert CIA operatives. They typically work abroad without diplomatic protection (often they pretend to work for some commercial enterprise). If these spies are caught, there's no guarantee that the United States would admit their true identities. When using official cover could put a spy's life and work at risk, NOC is the only alternative.

A little-noticed provision in the public section of a mostly-classified Senate intelligence bill signals that the Central Intelligence Agency is more serious than ever about plans to expand its program of setting up cover jobs for CIA officers outside of the usual posts in the State Department and other government agencies. Some believe the CIA's non-official cover, or NOC (pronounced KNOCK), program is the likeliest way for the agency to penetrate terrorist organizations or even, say, the nuclear program of Kim Jong Il's closed regime in North Korea.

"With terrorism, counter-proliferation — the kinds of threats that we face — you have to be more inventive in the way you deploy people overseas," said a knowledgeable U.S. official. "So you are going to have a lot of people who are not under official cover." America's most famous NOC is Valerie Plame, the CIA operative exposed last summer after a columnist reported that Bush administration officials had said she was behind a 2002 trip by her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, to Africa to investigate claims that Saddam had sought to buy uranium from Niger.

NOCs have traditionally been a tough position to fill. Though not a complete solution to the CIA's problem of gathering human intelligence, the NOC program can help. It's extremely expensive and dangerous to build a credible non-official cover by planting someone in, say, a corporate executive post in Islamabad or as a cell phone salesman in Madrid — positions in which a CIA officer would have no diplomatic immunity from arrest by the host government and little protection from deadly retribution by terrorists. Worse, the CIA has faced major bureaucratic hurdles in setting up an infrastructure to ensure that an NOC appears to be paid by a cover employer while actually being paid a government salary but at the same time only liable for taxes on a — often much lower — CIA officer's wage.

The Senate intelligence committee quietly passed a measure that makes it clear that the CIA can "pay salaries, allowances, retirement, insurance, and other benefits to CIA employees under non-official cover in a manner consistent with their cover." This also suggests that a NOC might be allowed to keep at least some of the larger salary that goes with their fake job.

Although some experts believe CIA Directors already have much if not all of this authority, this legislation would give the CIA additional flexibility. Demonstrating the importance of non-official cover across the entire U.S. intelligence community, the Senate bill also makes permanent the authority for the Pentagon to use front companies in its intelligence gathering, an authority that until now has been subject to renewal.

CIA continues to expand its NOC program. Intelligence officials say several hundred NOCs are now in the field, and the number is growing. Senior officials from the agency's National Collections Branch have been quietly approaching businesses doing overseas work to ask if they will provide covers for CIA case officers. Energy companies, import-export firms, multinational concerns, banks with foreign branches and high-tech corporations are among those being approached. Usually the company president and perhaps another senior officer, such as the general counsel, are the only ones who know of the arrangement. ``The CEOs do it out of a sense of patriotism,'' says former deputy CIA Director Bobby Inman.

In effect, the companies get free executives. For the cover to be plausible, the CIA must recruit business-school graduates who can put in a productive day's work with the firm and then spy during their off-hours. The CIA has even begun experimenting with recruiting mid-level corporate executives who yearn for adventure, then placing them in overseas firms as ``NOCs of convenience'' to penetrate a target for several years.

When the mission is over, the execs return to the business world. But while they are NOC officers, the CIA pays them a government salary. The company pays them a corporate salary-- usually much larger--to keep up the cover, but that money is quietly returned to the company. In fact, the agency's Covert Tax Branch has a secret relationship with the IRS to resolve the two W-2 forms an officer gets each year.

NOCs are out in the cold. But the CIA believes NOCs are the best way to carry out many clandestine operations. A foreign-intelligence service usually has no trouble spotting CIA officers operating under an embassy's cover. Not so for NOCs. ``If you're working drugs, thugs or tech transfers, you're going to be in banks all the time looking at financial transactions''--jobs often better suited for an officer under corporate cover, says a CIA contractor. NOC officers also have had more luck spying on ``hard targets'' such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, where the U.S. has no embassies in which to hide CIA operatives. In some countries, CIA is even experimenting with setting up two stations. One would be under the traditional embassy cover to serve as a decoy, while another much more secretive station would handle the NOCs.

In some cases, flamboyant conservative businessmen like Ross Perot and the late Malcolm Forbes have actively cooperated with the CIA in stationing officers worldwide. In other cases, obscure U.S. companies doing business abroad--such as a tiny Texas firm that deals in spare tractor parts in Latin America, cited by a former CIA officer--have taken part in the NOC program. Shipping lines, mineral and oil exploration firms, and construction companies with international operations, like the Bechtel Corp., often house NOCs.

By joining the CIA in clandestine activities, a company tacitly accepts that some of its employees could routinely break the law in another country and, if exposed, embarrass the company and endanger its other overseas employees.

Unlike most CIA officers, who are stationed abroad disguised as State Department employees, military officials, or other U.S. government personnel attached to an American embassy, NOCs operate without any apparent links to the U.S. government. They are able to approach people who would not otherwise come into contact with a U.S. embassy official. The CIA's operations within terrorist, drug trafficking, and arms dealer networks often involve NOCs, who can move more easily in such circles without raising suspicion.

In recent years, according to several CIA sources, NOCs have increasingly turned their attention to economics. Using their business covers, they seek to recruit agents in foreign government economic ministries or gain intelligence about high-tech firms in computer, electronics, and aerospace industries. They also help track the development of critical technologies, both military and civilian.

NOCs frequently stay 5, 10, or more years in one place. During that time, the NOC is truly "out in the cold." Their contacts with control officers in the CIA station are strictly limited; they do not have access to embassy files; and they must report through secret communications channels and clandestine meetings.

"As a NOC officer you are truly alone," says John Quinn, who spent much of the 1980s as a NOC in Tokyo. "The sense of isolation and loneliness is difficult to describe to those who have never experienced it." Because NOCs do not have the diplomatic immunity that protects CIA officers operating under embassy cover, if they are exposed they are subject to arrest and imprisonment--and they can be executed as spies.